The Digital Elevation Model over Europe from the GMES RDA project (EU-DEM) is a Digital Surface Model (DSM) representing the first surface as illuminated by the sensors. The EU-DEM dataset is a realisation of the Copernicus programme, managed by the European Commission, DG Enterprise and Industry.

GIS data

Color shaded DEM - EPSG:3035

Colour shaded relief image over Europe has been created using a hillshade dataset derived from the ETRS89-LAEA version of EU-DEM - please note that this dataset cannot be used for analysis purposes and that there are some known artifacts West of Norway.

Access to the data is governed by the draft delegated regulation on Copernicus data and information policy, as approved by the EC on 12th of July 2013, and in the process of decision making by the Council and European Parliament. This delegated act supplements regulation (EU) No 911/2010 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the European Earth monitoring programme (GMES). It establishes registration and licensing conditions for GMES/Copernicus users and defines criteria for restricting access to GMES/Copernicus dedicated data and GMES/Copernicus service information.

The following credit must be displayed when using these data: "Produced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union - EU-DEM layers."

Access and use of the data is made on the conditions that:
1. When distributing or communicating Copernicus data and information to the public, users shall inform the public of the source of that data and information.
2. Users shall make sure not to convey the impression to the public that the user's activities are officially endorsed by the Union.
3. Where that data or information has been adapted or modified, the user shall clearly state this.

Methodology:

The EU-DEM is a hybrid product based on SRTM and ASTER GDEM data fused by a weighted averaging approach and it has been generated as a contiguous dataset divided into 1 degree by 1 degree tiles, corresponding to the SRTM naming convention.

The spatial reference system is geographic, lat/lon with horizontal datum ETRS89, ellipsoid GRS80 and vertical datum EVRS2000 with geoid EGG08. These tiles have then been aggregated into 5°x5° tiles which have been projected to ETRS-LAEA by JRC.

In addition, a colour shaded relief image over Europe has been created using a hillshade dataset derived from the ETRS89-LAEA version of EU-DEM - please note that this dataset cannot be used for analysis purposes and that there are some known artifacts West of Norway.

The EU-DEM data are provided as is, i.e. without a formal validation yet. An independent statistical validation is scheduled as part of the GIO land monitoring service activities, and will be made available in the course of 2014.

Additional information

The EU-DEM is a 3D raster dataset with elevations captured at 1 arc second postings (2.78E-4 degrees) or about every 30 metre.

All three datasets are made available as tiles (5x5° or 1000x1000km) and as single files:- EU-DEM in ETRS89 geographic (EPSG code 4258)- EU-DEM in ETRS89-LAEA (EPSG code 3035)- Colour shaded relief image over Europe in ETRS89-LAEA (EPSG code 3035)

The datasets are encoded as GeoTIFF with LZW compression (tiles) or DEFLATE compression (European mosaics as single files).